Embodiments of the invention described in this specification relate generally to media stream switching, and more particularly, to a field programmable gate array (“FPGA”) offload module and process for frame-level switching of media streams in real-time.
Internet protocol (“IP”)/Ethernet switches are designed to switch traffic based on sessions. IP/Ethernet switches are not designed to switch IP streams on designated packet boundaries, or to align streams in preparation for IP switching. Because switchover is not aligned, this results in switching losses that cannot be tolerated by endpoints streaming high bandwidth low latency media streams. Thus, end point cost per port is high, and switching of streams after media extraction is expensive.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to offload functions required for seamless switching at the IP/Ethernet switch so that video streams can be switched exactly between frames, and to ensure that switching losses can be recovered.